The country’s youngest billionaire has pocketed another £100million from selling a share of his business, after it viral during the pandemic.
Johnny Boufarhat raised funding to launch video conferencing app Hopin in March 2020 after employees were told to work from home and businesses were forced to close their doors.
Now, the 27-year-old has net himself £100million after selling part of his stake in the super-fast growing business.
Boufarhat, a Manchester University graduate founded Hopin two years prior to the Covid outbreak – but had been unable to launch due to a lack of funding.
It began from his girlfriend's bedroom in King's Cross, London, in 2018, after he was left unable to work due to an autoimmune disease.
Boufarhat began coding the programme while unwell, eventually creating a platform that would allow conferences to be live-streamed over the internet.
Hopin's Zoom-style model supports home-working, enabling staff to network remotely and communicate via video calls.
Its user-base is currently over five million, amounting to a value of £4.1billion with American Express and Hewelett-Packard among clients.
The company’s soaring value has left Boufarhat with a net worth of £1.5billion, placing him in 113th place in the Sunday Times Rich List – a tally of Britain’s wealthiest individuals.
Boufarhat was born in Sydney after his parents - a mechanical engineer and an accountant - moved to Australia from Lebanon during the 1975-1990 civil war.
The family moved on to Los Angeles then Dubai before Boufarhat travelled to the UK to study mechanical engineering.
In his early days at university, Boufarhat developed an app that gave students discounts at restaurants.
But after graduating in 2018, he was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease which left him unable to get out of bed. That moment marked the birth of Hopin.
The 21-year-old was so ill that he was bedridden at his girlfriend’s flat in King’s Cross in London, where he was working for the construction group Multiplex.
He started coding Hopin, which over the next two years grew to a small team of eight developers.
In November 2019 Boufarhat famously told angel investors "it would be the fastest growing company in the world," just before the Covid-19 pandemic began.
He managed to secure millions in funding to launch the app in March 2020 after which "things went crazy", he said.
At the height of the pandemic, Hopin’s user base soared to five million, with 80,000 organisations - including American Express - using it.
Hopin had sales of £54million in the year to January 2021 and is forecast to rake in £130million this year.
Although it is registered in the UK, Boufarhat now lives in Barcelona with his fiancée, who works with him.
The firm operates remotely and his 500 employees are largely based in the US and UK.
Boufarhat – who admits he is incredibly work-focussed - once worked seven days a week but now takes a half day off on Saturdays.
He previously said: “I'm very, very work-focused. I just want to be as impactful as I can, in a positive way for the world... I'm boring - I don't drink, I don't do anything like that.
“I make sure all my food is organic. That's the biggest change I've made.
“I'm very, very work-focused”.
